founding fathers of the American strip cartoon, had joined the staff. The following year a
rival weekly, Judge, appeared, to be followed in 1883 by Life. In this illustrated trio can
be found the work of all the men who founded American strips: Richard F.Outcault who
gave the world The Yellow Kid, often considered the first newspaper strip hero (1896),
Rudolph Dirks, who created The Katzenjammer Kids in the likeness of the German bad
boys Max und Moritz, and George Herriman, who would evolve the most surrealistic
character ever seen in the funnies, Krazy Kat (1910).
The beginnings of the American newspaper strip can be seen in the translations of the
well-established Imagerie d’Epinal, published in France by Pellerin et Cie from the
1830s. These single sheets of stories for children, printed on extremely thin standard
Pellerin paper, and illustrated in twelve to sixteen pictures, were translated and
distributed in the USA from 1888 by the Humoristic Publishing Company of Kansas
City. (Sets have also been found in Britain, which suggests that they were also sold
there.) A total of sixty different sheets were issued beginning with ‘Impossible
Adventures’, the wild boastings of an old braggart in the style of Baron Munchhausen.
Echoes of many strips yet unborn may be found in these sheets, from fantastic
adventures (no. 1: ‘Impossible adventures’), fairy tales (no. 59: ‘Cinderella’), science-
fiction (no. 22: ‘King of the moon’), and illustrated ‘classics’ (no. 36: ‘Don Quichotte’
[sic]). Unfortunately it has proved impossible to discover whether these sheets were sold
singly, or in sets, and at what price.
These Anglo-French sheets did not introduce any continuing characters, but their
French-printed fullness of colour, alongside the Münchener Bilderbogen, acted as
inspiration to the press barons, who were seeking to expand their already flourishing
empires.
The first paper to pioneer cheap colour printing in the USA was the Chicago Inter-
Ocean. This paper introduced a family supplement in colour on 18 September 1892, and
the following year added a detachable children’s-section, The Youth’s Department. In the
spring of 1894, cartoonist Charles Saalburg introduced ‘The Ting-Lings’, a weekly full
page escapade in which a crowd of pint-sized Orientals wreaked topical havoc. In May
1897 they even crossed to Britain and helped Queen Victoria to celebrate her Diamond
Jubilee, an event reprinted ‘at a tremendous price’ in the woman’s weekly, Home Chat.
Occasionally these juvenile strips would be reprinted in books, such as Funny Folks
(1899), a compilation of forty strips by Franklin M. Howarth selected from Puck, and
Little Johnny and the Teddy Bears (1907), a full-colour book reprinting John R.Bray’s
strip from Judge.
More influential than the magazine strips, however, were the Sunday newspapers. The
circulation war between New York press barons William Randoph Hearst and his New
York Sunday Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York Sunday World, led to ever
burgeoning weekly packages of several sections. Then, using the new colour printing
press, Pulitzer introduced his Sunday Comic Weekly in The New York Sunday World (21
May 1893), and two years later this supplement included Outcault’s single-panel series,
‘Hogan’s Alley’. Among the crowds in that panel lurked a dumb, moronic, oriental
character soon to be known colloquially as The Yellow Kid, who made his comments, not
by talking, but via slangy scrawl on his bright yellow night-gown, his only clothing! This
series eventually evolved into a strip and has come to be thought of (erroneously) as the
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